Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Library of Congress on Flickr

Last week, the Library of Congress uploaded a small percentage of its photo collection to Flickr. The photos are from the 1910s, 30s and 40s. According to the Library's blog, this small pilot project has two goals:

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

In other words, they want viewers to enjoy, comment on, and tag the photos in their collection. They hope to learn previously unknown facts about the people, places and other subjects in these photos. They may have to wade through some sophomoric comments to get to the facts, but I think this is a great idea. I hope the experiment is a huge success.